Conservation International

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A two day meeting is currently taking place at the Columbia Law School in New York of the Private Sector Advisory Group to the Green Climate Fund. On the agenda is the Green Climate Fund’s funding of forestry projects.

Conservation International and the University of Guyana recently accepted US$10 million from ExxonMobil Foundation. This grant (or “investment”, as ExxonMobil likes to call it) reveals a lot about Conservation International and its support for the REDD carbon trading scheme.

A recent study looks at the costs to local communities of the Ankeniheny-Zahamena Corridor REDD project in eastern Madagascar. “Conservation restrictions result in very significant costs to forest communities,” the study concludes.

The Ankeniheny-Zahamena Corridor “has long been regarded as one of Madagascar’s top conservation priorities,” Conservation International tells us on its website. Conservation International is running a REDD project there covering more than 371,000 hectares.

In order for REDD projects to generate carbon credits, a “baseline scenario” has to be created. This is supposed to reflect what would have happened under business-as-usual, or what would have happened in the absence of the REDD project.

The Corridor Ankeniheny-Zahamena is a 382,000-hectare REDD project in Madagascar being carried out by Conservation International, with support from the World Bank. A new study shows that the project is not compensating many of the people whose livelihoods are impacted by the restrictions on forest use.

Julia Roberts, Harrison Ford, Kevin Spacey, Edward Norton, Penélope Cruz, Robert Redford, Ian Somerhalder. These are the big names that Conservation International has recruited for its new advertising campaign.

Two stories about the current failure of carbon trading as a way of raising money to address climate change: First, the Adaptation Fund, which has seen its income from a tax on carbon credits dry up; Second, an exchange between Conservation International and the World Bank, which are both pro-carbon trading, but only one seems to realise that the markets have collapsed.

Zulkifli Hasan, Indonesia’s Minister of Forestry, made the headlines last week when he said he was “shocked” by 71-year-old actor Harrison Ford’s questions about deforestation. Perhaps Zulkifli had forgotten the scale of the problem in Indonesia.

“If it’s wrong to wreck the climate, it’s wrong to profit from that wreckage.” That’s the slogan of the Fossil Free Movement, a campaign started by Bill McKibben and 350.org to persuade “educational and religious institutions, city and state governments, and other institutions that serve the public good” to divest from fossil fuels.

The Alto Mayo Protected Forest in the Peruvian Amazon covers about 182,000 hectares. Although it became a protected area in 1987, it remained under serious threat. Today it is the site of a REDD project run by Conservation International with funding from Walt Disney.

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REDDisms:

“The effects of climate change are already being seen, so increased action on climate change is inevitable. Tools like the CDM will become indispensable. The CDM is a functioning and effective tool that has proved its worth. Given the tangible threat that we face from climate change, it makes sense that we use the tools that we have at our disposal.”